observantTrapezium

You can’t successfully use a home email server.

Mostly true (server can be home but using the ISP network directly probably won’t work)

You can’t successfully use an email server on a (cloud) VPS.

Bullshit

You can’t successfully use an email server on a bare metal machine in your own datacenter.

Bullshit

As such, it is my distinct displeasure to declare the death of SMTP. The protocol is no longer usable. And as we can see, this devolution occurred organically.

Bullshit

I wonder if the process is open source or we just take their word that it’s privacy preserving. Anyway, privacy is not the only problem with online advertising, so I’m not going to give up adblocking any time soon.

Also note that if it’s just for personal use, you don’t have to have a domain for HTTPS. You can self sign, or create your own certificate authority, you just need to clients to trust it. But domains can be cheap or even free, so it’s better to get one so you don’t have to specially configure your devices.

Very nice. I’ve been daily driving KDE for 20 years and only changed the default wallpaper once or twice.

Borg for backup. I’m really surprised it’s not more widely known. It’s an incredible piece of software.

Also, not really lesser known software, but a lesser known feature of file systems including the ones we use in FOSS operating systems: extended file attributes - useful to add metadata to files without modifying them.

+1 for Whisper. Also, I use Piper for the reverse (text-to-speech).

Not sure it satisfies your requirements but I’m quite happy with Baïkal.

Borg is great.

Abrechnung is really good and actively developed and improving. The UI is already pretty satisfactory, and there’s also an API which is needed if for example you want to bulk-import a spreadsheet, for now you have to code it a bit.

Came here to say just that. The WebDAV synchronization target is great.

Joplin as well, syching my 3 devices with the WebDAV option. I checked a few other options about a year ago and Joplin seemed the best.

A mid-late 24th century Starfleet runabout?

Piper is my choice. Very easy to use from the command line, fairly good sounding voices. Prior to that, for years (decades?) I used espeak-ng, had a very robotic voice but articulated almost everything very clearly, and I got used to it so didn’t actually mind.

It’s not even called incognito in FF.

I’m very happy with self-hosted Vaultwarden.

Baikal is lean and great. I use it and sync to my Thunderbird (using the TbSync extension) and Android phone (using DAVx⁵).

Agree about Joplin. No need for a full NextCloud instance, I use the WebDAV option which Apache has pretty much out of the box.

I joined WhatsApp after many years of holding out, there was simply no other practical way to keep in touch with many people. The ways I mitigate the privacy concerns are:

1. I got an international eSIM, for the purpose of cheap roaming abroad but since I now had this extra phone number not tied to my identity, I used it for WhatsApp.
2. I installed WhatsApp using Island so it has access to just the contacts in the “work profile”, that is, just people who have WhatsApp anyway.

Matrix was introduced a few months before Discord was launched in 2015, so better say that Discord is the proprietary and centralized alternative to Matrix 😜

I’ve been using nothing but Linux at home and work for 20 years and it’s news to me that these words are not equal synonyms.